STORM

This is ACE. We just had a power cut. The wind is howling against my window. Nature is busy helping us remember who is in charge.

Growing up in Jersey we all knew where the candles were. Now there’s a cable to French nuclear but back then it was just old smokey. They still occasionally stoke the fucker up, when the French start getting ornery. It’s a monolithic old cole station, but tiny in the scheme of things.

I thought I was going to drive home tonight after the show. That would’ve been two hours in darkness through this bastard storm. I decided yesterday with the theory of the storm that I’d sooner have an early start tomorrow and drive through the wreckage.

This afternoon we were at the Wyeside Arts Centre. They are providing cinema and theatre for a huge catchment area but some fool has withdrawn their funding. I know this area. Fuck, this building is needed. It wouldn’t have sprung up if it hadn’t been needed. These idiots who are judging arts by profit alone? They are killing light.

I’ve just plugged into the theatre community here, around Builth Wells. Yeah so I’m (currently) from the big London, but … I’ve come in and worked joyfully with all walks of life. Everything from ex barristers to ex army to those who might be excluded because of neurological differences. Powerful humans, in society, making something together. From the guy who thinks he doesn’t have to work to learn his lines to the gal who knows them backwards and doesn’t trust herself.

After the show, driving back, a tree went down right across the road. This is a big fast main road. It was a young pine, and it somehow managed to be exactly the width of the road. The car in front of me was closest to it and stopped in time. With our hazards on we all stopped, and some of us got out the car into the storm. Absolutely shitting it with rain, it was, and we all knew which cars were just sitting there watching us work.

The lady in the white Audi was in front of me. Together we ascertained it was impossible for the two of us to move it. Thankfully my “come on!” type gestures yielded Megan from a car behind, and joyfully three lads who could have been rugby players who were going in the other direction. We briefly made a community. The tree was rotated out of the road. Even a young pine on a pivot is heavy. We did it. We felt good.

Now I’m listening to the weather again here in my room with lovely bedding. I’m very happy to be here another night. There’s a tree across the driveway too, apparently. I’ll be leaving first thing tomorrow and hopefully be back in time to be Mister Panda tomorrow morning with whatever clearing I need. We shall see what the situation is. Largely I suspect that by half 8 tomorrow most of the trees on the roads will have been moved by similar committees if strangers to the one we found ourselves part of. I have a feeling that, no matter how big the tree, enough people on that main road would have eventually been involved that it would have been swung. It was astonishing how quickly something difficult became something easy with numbers. A remembrance for all the sad idiots who forget the existence of time and numbers when they try to refigure ancient works. “Only aliens could have done X”

We moved a fallen tree. We had never met each other. We worked together. It was quick.